Slobodan Praljak, a former Bosnian Croat official who was on trial
Wednesday at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, has reportedly died after drinking poison. Praljak, 72, was filmed drinking the poison Wednesday.
Appeals judges upheld his 20-year sentence for war crimes against Bosnian
Muslims during the war in the Balkans in the 1990s, prompting Praljak to stand
up and address the court in The Hague, Netherlands.
“Judges, Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal,” he said. “With disdain,
I reject this verdict.”
He then drank from what appeared to be a small vial, ignoring calls from
the judge to sit down.
“I have taken poison,” he said, according to a court translator. See the video here.
The judge suspended the hearing and Praljak was brought in for treatment,
according to Reuters. He reportedly died in a hospital in The Hague.
Praljak was a former assistant minister of defense of Croatia, and later
commander of the main staff of the former Croatian Defense Council, a militia
operating in Bosnia. He was originally sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2013.
The Yugoslavia tribunal, created in 1993 by the United Nations Security
Council, has prosecuted hundreds of people for war crimes and is scheduled to
shut down at the end of this year.
The Yugoslav army targeted Bosnian Muslims and Croats in a brutal
conflict that killed more than 100,000 people. The ICTY has played an integral
role in shedding light on some of these atrocities, including the 1995 genocide in the town of Srebrenica and the
use of rape as a weapon of war.
Gen. Ratko Mladic, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” was convicted last week of genocide, war crimes and
crimes against humanity, and given a life sentence. “Everything that you have said
is pure lies,” he yelled in response. “Shame on you.”
Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, died of a heart attack in his jail cell in 2006, while
his own ICTY trial was underway.
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